Emailing "Are We Running Out of Coal?"
If you run a data center, chances are really good that the electricity powering your servers and drives began when coal was burned. The United States produces more coal than any other country on Earth except for China, at about 1.1 billion tons of production per year. About half the electricity in the United States is generated by burning coal. It is abundant, it is cheap, and unlike wind or solar energy, can be stored and used on-demand to meet peak energy needs in the winter and summer. It also has the nasty habit of producing carbon dioxide when burned, and is thought to be a major contributor to global warming.
While energy legislation, if passed, will eventually raise the price of coal-fired electricity through a cap-and-trade program, that seems to be a few years away at least (the current legislation provides generous allowances to current coal producers). For the time being, then, coal appears to be the bedrock upon which electricity is generated in this country, powering everything in our home and work (including those ever-important data centers!).
So how much coal does the United States have? The answer turns out to be vexing, and is explored in an excellent piece in the
Wall Street Journal yesterday. Back in 1907, when the U.S. Geological Service first began estimating how much coal the U.S. has, the first estimate said that we had three trillion tons, enough to last 5,000 years. By the 1950's, equipped with more sophisticated data, the estimate was down dramatically to 500 billion tons. As recently as 2007, the government estimated that the United States has 240 years of economically recoverable coal.
Now, using more data and more sophisticated assumptions including the economic impact of climate legislation, some economists are arguing that the supply of coal is actually much less. From the article:
No one says the U.S. is facing a coal shortage. But the emerging ranks of "peak coal" theorists argue that current production levels may be unsustainable and, if anything, create a false sense of security. David Rutledge, an electrical-engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology who has studied global coal production, figures the U.S. has about half as much recoverable reserves as the government says, which would work out to about 120 years' worth.
If these estimates become the new official government estimate, the implications may be profound. Coal is non-renewable, and as the day the country runs out of coal draws ever nearer, the pressure on society to explore alternatives for energy generation are going to increase dramatically. Whether it happens in one or two or three generations, one thing is clear: The data centers run by our grandchildren are probably not going to be run by coal-fired electricity.